"Craig Dickson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> I agree, and would add (if I'm recalling correctly) that LISP lacks lexical
> scoping, which may not be an absolute requirement for functional programming
Some old dead lisps might lack lexical scoping, at least CL has it
since a long time. The only places I know about where old lisps still
live are Reduce and Autocad (is this still dynamical?).
> simplistic, binary distinction), then you have to decide where to draw the
> line between "functional languages" and other languages that may, to some
I think it became impossible to draw that line since the inventors
and maintainers of dysfunctional langauges learned that FP is cool
and added closures etc. (Perl has them since 5.001m, Javascript
since 1.2, just to mention a few).
> degree, include support for functional programming. LISP has much more
> support for FP than C++ or Perl, but not as much as Scheme, which in turn is
This again is a matter of taste -- Lisp has series, which is hard to
do in scheme (the problem is not the formal behavior (this is IIRC in
SICP), but the optimizing macroexpansion (series redefines defun
etc. into codewalkers)).
Ralf
